A Final Year Project(FYP) guide.

A final year project(FYP) may seem very confusing and overwhelming at first, but later down the hill, the process gets easier.

Visual of just how your FYP development process will look like

Rewinding to the 6th semester, where we were given two tasks:

1. To find FYP partners

2. To search for the FYP ideas

These are the only two things you need to focus on right now. That’s it.

FYP partners? Yes, which one to look for?

As easy as to be explainable:

• Someone from your batch and department

• Someone who has a lower GPA (if you are a high GPA holder) and vice versa. Just so they make sure the low GPA holders get their projects completed for graduation criteria.

• Find those who are passionate enough to pursue so and so project with equal dedication, time, and recognizable efforts. It’s important to have the right partners.

• Please, please choose your FYP partners wisely. Sometimes even you have to choose productive FYP partners over your friends. I repeat sometimes.

FYP ideas:

This is legit a golden chance for every student to have their ideas pursued/implemented as their FYPs. An FYP committee is assigned to evaluate your ideas roughly based on their Technology domain and the type (discussed ahead)

But keeping the following simple rules of your FYP (not strictly these):

• The domain should include industry 4.0 technologies including AI, DS, ML, DL, and IoT. (*search the others too)

• No, you can’t choose to build a solely dedicated Web or a Mobile application without the blend and the integration of the technology domain mentioned above.

• An FYP could be thought of as a long-term project, adding value to your CV and your experience so don’t do it just to get a degree, but to represent the work you put in for your co-operate life ahead(including job interviews, masters, etc.).

FYP streams:

So an FYP can be broken down into either of the 2 filtered streams:

1. A research-based FYP.
2. A product-based FYP.

Choosing a research-based FYP is very important for someone who wants to show their research skills, has to pursue a master’s degree (which requires your research experience/work), or for any company where you’ll be interviewed for any position.

Choosing a product-based project is for the startup, entrepreneur mindset hunters who want their FYPs to be transformed into products with the funding of startups.

FYP apprenticeship and funding programs:

Here’s a treat for either of your projects chosen from the above streams:

1. 10Pearls, FYP Accelerator program.

2. Ignite, NGIRI.

3. National Incubation Centers (NICs)

4. Google Solution challenge.

5. Microsoft Imagine cup.

6. (Inclusive) Other local competitions.

The above-mentioned programs/competitions can be a great source for developing, and showcasing your project to get project funding.

For the projects needing hardware, it gets hard for us students to manage them considering they’re either very expensive to buy new, or rent, or even borrow (with a fear of returning them in a good condition, of course). That’s when these programs come in handy.

A detailed blog covering The experience in the 10Pearls FYP accelerator program is here.

We also presented our Deep Learning-based FYP in NEP NIC Jamshoro and here’s how we pitched our product.

The rest of the competitions are very useful regardless of their specialties and help to achieve your FYP as a successful current and future project. Indeed.

Supervisors:

Fatima, will they let us choose supervisors for our FYPs?

An answer to this is- dear, it varies from department to department.

Software Engineering students don’t get the chance to choose among the supervisors rather they’re assigned.

Honestly, supervisors will just be there to monitor your progress/work through the weekly meetings you will have with them in your 7th and 8th semester, and they’ll make you connect with co-supervisors (or mentors) to solve your development or thesis-related queries. The rest of the work is done by the student (which includes doing everything yourself).

Getting started:

The real deal for the implementation and development begins and you just like the 6th semester me, would be wondering where to start, how to start, and what to do.

An FYP project starter pack includes:

• Finding a relevant YouTube playlist of your project.

• Source code from GitHub (plugged because it is very authentic)

• Relevant research papers from which can be found on:

1. Research gate
2. IEEE Xplore
3. Google scholars
4. Cornell university’s (arxiv.org)

• Your project’s online documentation.

And you’re all set.

Technologies:

Again, the technologies will vary for each project but they must-have skills in the following tech stack for starting your FYP:

• Python (beginner to intermediate) and the videos for it are already available on YouTube.

• Web development or Mobile App development (which is already made to be studied in the previous semesters so that it shouldn’t be new to students), choosing a single platform is necessary here. Either it will be a web application or a mobile application for the integration of your main Industry 4.0 technologies mentioned earlier.

• Git/GitHub for testing periodic changes/deployment or to save your heavy LFS file types such that they can be shared with anyone for any help.

• Google Colab (as it provides free GPU = for heavy requiring DL/ML projects) or Jupyter notebook.

• The rest of the technologies can be self-explored according to your projects and then you may follow that language’s provided online documentation over google to learn about them.

• Problem searching skills on Google and Stack Overflow, and GitHub issues ( IMPORTANT! )

Whatever you learn, CODE it!

I repeat, rather than asking anyone, rely on Google, YouTube, GitHub, or Stack Overflow as the answers to any of your technical to nontechnical questions.

Presentations:

In Final Year you’ll have to appear for two important presentations to evaluate your nascent FYPs to the final FYPs.

One, in the initial FYP presentations with externals, analyzes and judges your projects to give you open feedback to improve the projects and results.

The initial FYP presentation (ppt) topics may include:

Presentation Outline:

The following is the rough outline for presentations; you can add or delete a section with the consent of your supervisor.

1. Introduction
2. Problem statement
3. Motivation
4. Literature review (include relevant research papers of your FYP)
5. Tools and technologies
6. Methodology (include flow charts or other charts to represent your FYP model)
7. Summary
8. Timeline
9. References (of your research papers used in the literature review)

Secondly, Final FYP presentations consist of extremely witty externals/professors. There you may expect a detailed survey of your developed project.

(*will be edited with Final FYP presentation content once given from my experience as we yet have to appear for it)

Now that you know everything, don’t waste your time, each of your day’s work counts. Remember to complete your FYP before or by the end of August ( with strict deadlines for you and your team to follow) so you may enjoy your last few months as an undergraduate student, cause man you’re going to witness the time flying by quickly and you might miss on the enjoyment you deserved. An OG suggestion, trust me.

I hope all your questions were answered in this blog. I will write another blog for thesis writing after the gathered experience by the start or end of November. Till then I wish everyone the best of luck with their projects.

You can connect with me here.